Interview with Alycia Ripley
We are pleased to have with us Alycia Ripley as she chats about her Mystery Novel that is a combination of mysticism and paranormal experiences. Welcome to Reader Views Alycia. Juanita: Alycia, thank you for sharing your thoughts with your readers today. Your book “Traveling with an Eggplant” is getting rave reviews and we are very delighted to have the chance to hear more. Please tell us how long your book was in the making, and what was your inspiration?
I didn’t start actually writing it until I began graduate school at NYU and so the writing itself took from 2001 until 2005, right up until it was published. I think the prose was finished up while I was at Strasberg, an acting school, and then the editing took place after that. It’s a deceptively simple book- it took me years to thread in all the themes and bizarre, surreal, magical connections that had to flow from the beginning to the end in order to make sense if you analyzed it. I’m a stickler for NO plot or theme holes…it took a long time to thread in the science, and the surreal imagery, and the supporting characters’ dilemmas so that it all made sense and could survive the complicated ending and the analysis thereof. Plus, much of the book was workshopped while at NYU so of course that took up a great deal of time but I’m thankful for it- it definitely helped and shaped the book and taught me how to edit. Juanita: Are any of the characters reminiscent of someone you’ve crossed paths with? Alycia: Besides Alison and Seymour which are definitely based on me and the aforementioned male, the character of Tara was based on two good friends of mine- one was my friend Kathy who is a platinum blonde, super organized, Polish lawyer from the suburbs of Albany as Tara is in the book. The other half came from my friend Baiba who was like a second mother to me - Tara has a lot of her adages and attitudes. The really sad part is that I began writing about Tara’s brain tumor and two months later, found out Baiba had one and was in the hospital. I couldn’t write at all for a while after that because I felt so oddly and irrationally responsible. She passed away in 2003 and I knew then I had to continue- I could use my heartbreak to make this character and her situation come alive in a greater way and seeing as how Baiba was the biggest fan of my writing and becoming an author, I knew she’d want me to do so. It was a chance to save them both. The rest of characters are all inspired by people I knew or came across but are not exactly them- they are the essences of people sponged up and tossed into these characters. I don’t think there is anyone I completely made up- they are all based in someone and I tossed in some close homages to my friends as well. And of course, the character of the grandmother in the book is my grandmother to a tee. She was incredibly important to the novel in a way that I hadn’t been aware of until I began writing and she influenced so much of it- she really is the heart of the novel and its sense of justice. Juanita: Will we find any of your personality colored into the characters in your book? Alycia: Outside of our occupations being a bit different, Alison is as close to me as you can get. That was a bit scary actually- even though it’s a fictional novel and thank God FICTION is in bright green letters on the back cover, I don’t need any of this nonsense surrounding James Frey to come anywhere near me, I won’t even get into how ridiculous I think that brouhaha is- I’m glad I said explicitly that it’s not a memoir- its based on people and events but it’s a large hodgepodge of magical, surreal fiction, an adventure story. This is my statement to the Smoking Gun- if I said someone was wearing a green t-shirt and it was actually aqua, it doesn’t matter. It’s a book, not a political manifesto…stay away from me! Now that I got that out I can get off my soapbox…it was a scary thing even if it IS fiction to put Alison out there because her personality is all me and it was like saying to people- here I am in all my strange contradictions- the people pleasing, the defiance, the inability to let go and the strange ability to make things happen, the past demons, the goals and semi- mistakes (I don’t see anything as a mistake, only a learning experience and I never regret anything) so here I am- write what you want about her/me. It’s definitely a strange thing to put yourself out there like that. And oddly and ironically enough- the character of Chloe is a tad like me in her dialogue style and blatant, twisty desire to help the situation. Juanita: Who is your reading audience and why are they enjoying your book so much? Alycia: I’m actually not sure- from the emails it seems the audience varies wildly in age. I imagined the main audience would be in their twenties and thirties as they could tangibly relate to the characters as they age from 22 to 35 but I get a lot of emails and comments at readings and signings from people in their fifties and sixties and how they really connected to the themes and that’s something that doesn’t surprise me at all- there are themes that people who have lived a bit longer can appreciate- the way of looking at life, the concept of what’s more important: the journey or the destination. I think to enjoy it you have to be able to throw yourself into a story and be imaginative- the story is realistic but soon takes a turn for the strange and surreal and you have to trust that the microcosm of the book and its plot is going to reward you in the end if you study it and question it and try to interpret it. It’s for people who love to think and wonder and are steeped in imagination. I can’t vouch for why they’re enjoying it- I can only say I’m so happy that they are! It was a pleasure to write it and share it with everyone. Juanita: What kind of research did you do for “Traveling with an Eggplant?” Alycia: I studied my journal for the first part- I’ve kept journals from very early on. I studied all of them to help me articulate myself into a character and provide her with the attributes I needed to make apparent. Luckily I kept a journal of my experiences and friendship/relationship with the person who inspired Seymour so that I could look back and really feel the good times and bad times and make the story as vivid as possible. The other thing that helped was that I had his exact words written down. When writing you usually have to change the dialogue of real life people because once written down it looks boring and uninspired, it’s a lot of “Yeahs” and “Ands” and whatnot. But this person, the soon to be Seymour, had such a wonderful, stylized way of speaking that I couldn’t have ever improved upon it or changed it one bit. He made my life easier and really was such a wonderful character before he ever hit the page. I had to do A LOT of research on music journalism as I had only a vague sense of what it was. I always read Spin and Rolling Stone and even had some vintage copies of Creem, but I read at least twelve books written by or about female music journalists through the years so that I could get a sense of how they spoke and what positive and negative experiences they had, in particular, because they were women. It was a really enlightening experience- doing that research, reading the books, shadowing people at rock magazines. It’s definitely a male-based journalism and to stand out as a woman you have to stand by your values and find a way to be one of the guys and cool without losing sense of your femininity and self and navigating your way around rock stars and the craziness that comes with them. I did a lot of research on brain tumors and neuroscience, even visited the lab of one of my neuroscientist friends, to get a feel for Seymour’s life that I wasn’t a part of and get the details right for certain scenes. The concept of audiokinesis is something I made up but having done research on similar kinetic abilities made it easier to bring it to life in a realistic way. And oddly, right after the book was sent to the publishers, the New York Times did an article about musical hallucinations and how they’re a valid problem and what it’s like to live with them…I couldn’t have been more thrilled. It made me feel the book was meant to come out, like I got a karmic sort of thumbs up! Juanita: You really have a talent for writing. Please give us a little background on your writing history. Alycia: Thank you for that- that’s really nice. I stopped thinking about what a ‘good’ writer was and what ‘good’ writing was back when I was at NYU when a lot of students seemed so steeped in writing the Great American Novel and being a critics’ darling. That couldn’t have meant less to me. I just wanted to write vividly and complex enough to make a little movie in readers’ heads and if I achieved that, then I feel happy and successful. My background is just that I was a child obsessed with characters and stories and movies. I was always writing stories or making my toys come alive with personalities and wrote everything down in my chicken-scrawl. I wanted to write books and films and to act in them. It’s difficult to get a film produced so I decided to do it in the way that was most accessible to me- writing a book and making it as cinematic as I could for the reader. In high school I wrote some stories- one of them won one of those little county awards and my family was so excited- but that was really it. I just kept most of them in my head or the ideas in my journal- I wasn’t one of these kids that went through this ‘depressing poem’ stage at all- I didn’t share most of what I wrote- I just kept it in notebooks and ‘prepped the product’ as my good friend likes to put it. In college I loved English classes and took one with Mary Karr, author of The Liars Club, and she showed me why the beginning and end of each section in a novel is so important and what you have to do to bring a book that is based in personal experience to life- it’s often different than just straight fiction. But the first formal training I had was at NYU which I loved- the teachers were wonderful, especially Chuck Wachtel. I don’t believe these programs can teach you to write but they can shape your voice and the other people in your workshop can teach you how to edit your own material, an invaluable gift. You need to be able to do this because you won’t be in graduate school forever! So there wasn’t a lot of background outside of being an extremely imaginative child who believed the reality of any given moment was only a stepping stone to what I could make happen. Juanita: Readers really like to know more about the authors that pen such creative works. Please give us a little more insight into Alycia Ripley. Where were you born? What are you passionate about? What is your underlying philosophy of life? Alycia: I was born and raised in Buffalo, New York, a city really close to my heart that I will always consider home no matter how much I move around for work or whatever state I settle in. My parents divorced when I was an infant and I was raised by my mother and grandmother. We had a small family of my mom, grandmother, aunt, uncle, and two cousins but our extended family was huge- family friends, adult friends that took a interest in me and my future, etc. When I was twelve my mother met a wonderful man who helped raise me from that point on. Before twelve, things were a tad rocky and if you read the book you’ll see in what sense I mean, but that soon came to an end. I blame no one for it because like I said earlier, everything happens for a reason and influences our character and I was provided with a great villain for the story- so no worries there. But my childhood and adolescence was happy and there was a lot of love around me- I was always treated as an adult and encouraged to be who I was- imaginative, crazy, and a little different. Definitely an entertainer. I always wanted to be an actor and a writer- nothing else. No ballerina stage, no firewoman, just acting and writing. Luckily both of those things have started happening or else I’d have lost my mind by now. Besides those two things, I’m passionate about my family, my friends who are hilarious and supportive, about dogs- I’d love to have twelve dogs around me at any given time- about Canada- I’m obsessed with Canada, which is one of the reasons I chose Guelph as the hometown of Alison Olson in the book, unicorns, 80’s music, men with round faces and dimples, harmless sarcasm, red velvet cake, traveling, and creativity. The thing everyone gets a kick out of but I tend to forget about is that I changed my name to Ripley when I was fourteen. I had this really strong sense of who I wanted to be when all was said and done and if I could achieve self-actualization I would be like Ellen Ripley, Sigourney Weaver’s character in the Alien movies, because she was so smart, resourceful, calm, and excellent in a crisis. I wanted to be the person others wanted to stand next to if all hell broke loose. I felt if I had the name as a constant reminder it would help me remember this goal. It was also such a great name- if I was lucky enough to make it as a writer or an actor, it was a name I’d want people associating with me. I explained this all to my mother and she completely understood- I started using it all through high school and we had it legally changed at the end of it. It was the best gift anyone could have given me. I suppose that leads into my philosophy of life- that we can become who and what we want to be, what we’re supposed to be if we really try and really want it and believe in ourselves. We can always improve and change. When I was about ten I said to my mother, “I’d rather die than be mediocre.” That was it- that sums me up perfectly. I wanted to be somebody- getting married, having children, that was all great, too- but above all- I wanted my work to mean something, to touch people, to stand out, to matter, to be known for something great and unique. To really validate my life and being here- my mother didn’t have it easy raising me as a single parent- she gave up a lot. So I felt that I needed to matter in a way that would make all the sacrifices done for me really WORTH it. I was capable of so much, she encouraged me to do so much and stand out- I wanted to be special- I wanted to matter and do good work and influence everyone else to be creative and colorful and do something different and fantastic that only they could do. God, I’m going to come off so hippie-dippy with this but I guess that’s how it goes. My philosophy is that we should strive to be special, to do work that is unique and different and matters and helps people and the human condition in some way, to not sit back and just live, what a waste! To color outside the lines and break some rules! Juanita: And of course, we all want to know, are you really a fan of 80’s music? Alycia: Absolutely! Even before I consciously knew it, music played a very important role in my life- I never had real allegiances to singers or bands - I saw them more as soundtracks and scores to images, stories, characters I was writing or watching in my head. Being so obsessed with films and books from such a young age, I saw music as a perfect accompaniment to words and people and scenes and so it became integral to everything I wrote. I’m actually sort of freaky in that sense- my headphones are always way too close to me at any given time. I grew up in the 80’s and so that music is especially important because I remember these albums and their singles in a really tangible, vivid way. There was something about the 80’s I don’t feel can be repeated again- a real sense of fun and heart and individualism, funkiness, and groove that had nothing to do with being ‘alternative’ or holding some greater importance or allegiance to anything other than exactly what they were. The sense of fun even in darker stuff like Depeche Mode or The Cure just had a perfect flow and melody- they were like little movies or stories in themselves. I can’t write without music on- while writing the book there were times I played General Public’s ‘Tenderness’ or The Cure’s ‘Cut Here’ over and over again until something from my head came onto the page the way I wanted. I’m a really social person but when the headphones go on and I see the way a character walks or a scene should flow, I’ m in another world for as long as I can be. Juanita: Your book has been suggested to be a re-imagining of the classics ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘The Wizard of Oz’. Please elaborate on these comparisons. Alycia: I planned the structure of the novel as homage to these works because they are two of my favorite stories of all time. The beginning and end are like bookends and those are the sections that are most similar to these classic stories. If you read the very beginning up until the storm sequence, which is very similar to The Wizard of Oz, the events are a certain way. After that point, they change and it’s up to the reader to figure out what happened at the end of the book, after the second ‘bookend.’ Did the characters share the same magical dream or did they have a parallel life that Alison decided she needed to go back and change for the better? Either way- it’s a magical story with sci-fi elements that interested me as I wrote them. Alison is definitely a modern day Dorothy Gale and perspicacious readers will pick up on the fact that the college Alison attends is called Gale University. The theme of colors in the novel is also similar to Dorothy’s adventures. In terms of Alice in Wonderland, it has that same bookend style where you have to determine if it’s a dream or if it actually happened and there are certain characters that are reminiscent of Carroll’s story- Seymour (and Alison’s career goals) are the White Rabbit, Seymour’s friends have characteristics of the Caterpillar, Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee, etc. Mostly, I think it’s due to the novel being structured in form and bookended like these stories, which was a very deliberate move on my part. Not only do I love the surrealness and magic of these stories, it was a subtle hint to readers to pay attention to certain passages and events. The stories are all similar in the fact that you begin in this definite ‘reality’ that changes and twists and turns into something still reality but warped and strange and odd and colorful and a heroine has to find her way out, and also decipher in what ways the adventure made her reality ‘better.’ Juanita: What is the underlying theme or message in “Traveling with an Eggplant.” Alycia: That everything happens for a reason. Everything. That the journey of life is so much more integral to our character and to life itself than the destination. That negative things happen but ONLY if you look at them in a negative way. My pet peeve is when people say ‘Life isn’t fair’, ‘This shouldn’t have happened, this isn’t fair, why would God let this happen?’ My perspective has always been- life isn’t fair! That’s the point! The point is that God or Fate or Karma or whatever you believe gives us challenges and how we react to it and what we make of it is what shapes and forms our character. It’s all about our personal mettle and what we’re made of. Alison is made of much more than she ever thought- that her self-reliance and sense of love and sacrifice is HUGE and that’s character, not whether she ends up with Seymour or becomes a hugely known music journalist. Both may happen but that’s not the point. That who we are has less to do with our occupations than people like to think- that we have a destiny that has nothing to do with our occupations and everything to do with our character and what we can do and who we can help and maybe there’s this one major thing that only WE can do and this one thing makes us who we are. Juanita: You are working on a second novel. Please tell us a little about your upcoming book and when your readers can expect it to hit the shelves? Alycia: I’m working on some short stories that I have already written or am in the process of writing that people will be able to buy really inexpensively through my site on Paypal- they’ll have something to check out while I’m working on the second novel. The stories will eventually be in a novella collection but I thought it would be fun to put a few of them out early…The next novel is called Winterphoenix and is about a mother and daughter who go to a small, picturesque town in Canada for a trip before the insanity of Christmas begins and end up in a far worse craziness. Without giving too much away I’ll say that because of something that happens to the mother, the daughter has to, with the help of some Native Americans in the area, focus her rage and emotions into finding the person responsible, and thus turning into the person these Native Americans believe and have prophesized her to be. Alison Olson sort of represents the person I was when I wrote Traveling With An Eggplant, and Winterphoenix represents the person I am right now. It’s intense and scary and definitely more downbeat than ‘Eggplant.’ I’m so excited to be writing it though- it’s all about our Boogeymen and I’ve felt I’ve had one my entire life- I’ve just run faster than him and he hasn’t caught up to me yet…That book will be out next year, I’m not sure of an exact date. This is why I wanted to put the stories out in the meantime- they’re all varied and run the gamut of plot and characters and figured that if people liked the first novel, they might want something to read before the second comes out. Juanita: How can readers contact you if they have any more questions regarding your book? Alycia: There is a website, www.alyciaripley.com that has more information about the book and myself than anyone could possibly want. You can also order the book through the site for a less expensive price than Amazon or my publisher and receive it more quickly as well. I can always be contacted through the site- the questions and comments get forwarded to me- and I try to respond as quickly as possible. There is a blog in which I answer a lot of the most frequently asked questions and also have a running commentary on everything from the book tour to random, ridiculous things that happen during my day that readers might get a kick out of. Juanita: Thank you so much for talking with us today. All the best with “Traveling with an Eggplant” and your future endeavors. We will undoubtedly be hearing more in the years to come from this creative new talent. Alycia, is there any last thoughts you’d like to share with your readers? Alycia: I’m truly thankful for the reader support and thrilled at how they’ve been embracing the book and telling others about it. That’s the thing with indie publishing houses- you are awarded the creative control, the royalties, the copyright, but it’s up to you and any fans you make to push the book and get it out there- I don’t have a huge see all-know all publishing company behind me- I decided to go with the house that allowed me more freedom but the hard part is getting the book in the public eye. The readers have helped immensely with this. On that same note- I’d like to encourage people to write, all the time, anytime. So many people tell me in conversation that their work isn’t good enough, that they would never be able to get published. My theory is- if you believe you have a great story to tell, write it down- don’t edit yourself or let self-doubt creep in- just write and then edit to the best of your ability. Show it to a friend whose opinion you value, edit some more, and contact an independent house and see if they’d be interested. Publishing is changing- it’s no longer dictated by these huge houses that publish only two new authors a year. I believe there are great writers out there with wonderful stories to tell who are now much more likely to be heard. I’m always reminded of a line from that movie, Sideways, where Jack the actor friend says to Miles, the writer, “I believe in your book, Miles, and I’ll help you publish it. The point is to get it out there, get it in libraries. Let the public decide.” That’s the whole point- let the public decide, not some huge publishing house that is just interested in moving a few units regardless of whether it’s creative or unique or good or not. Often, they just want something that is a rip off of something else that was a hit- not original work. So don’t let them intimidate you- just keep writing and when you’re ready- go with an independent label and see what happens. I have a bit of a workhorse mentality- keep your head to the ground, one foot in front of the other, but it works. Color outside the lines, go outside the box, write what you love to read and I guarantee you- there’s an audience waiting to read it, too
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